Temporary Compromise Reached by Factions in Madrid’s Jewish Community

Warring factions in Madrid’s troubled Jewish community agreed to a temporary compromise today after a British rabbi mediating their dispute warned the community leaders to make peace “so that what appeared in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency Bulletins does not become an irrevocable fact.”

Rabbi Abraham Rose, of the London-based Conference of European Rabbis, was referring to a dispatch in the March 9, 1972 issue of the JTA’s Daily News Bulletin which reported that a “serious internal dispute…threatened to split the (Madrid Jewish) community into two bodies, one Sephardic and the other Ashkenazic.” His warning was contained in telegrams to Roberto Bensadon Laredo, 42, president of the Jewish community here, and Max Mazin, 49, the opposition leader.

The community’s general assembly, acting on the telegrams, agreed today to elect a temporary care-taker committee to serve for about a year until passions cool. The committee will be charged with the task of holding democratic community elections in the spring of 1973 and restoring peace between the opposing factions.

Only a few hundred Jews lived in Spain directly after World War II, most of them refugees from European communities destroyed by the Nazis. At present, there are about 10,000 Jews in Spain, according to Laredo. He told the JTA that about 6000 of them–60 percent–live in Madrid and Barcelona, the two largest cities. But organized Jewish communities exist in seven other Spanish localities, including Ceuta, the Balearic Islands and the Canary Islands. An association for Judaeo-Christian Friendship has been active in Spain since 1961, Laredo said. He said it was founded at Jewish initiative to counteract anti-Semitic activities by right-wing extremists during the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel.